There are a lot of them in progress, and we’ve mentioned a few already (MF/Quinn). Not sure if I should spoil the rest.

There will be a bunch of them with like 1 skill or mechanic change (like the juggernauts) focused on making them more unique. Some marksmen, Lucian and Graves for example, have a ton of overlap in playstyle and strengths/weaknesses. We hope to fix those type of overlaps.

On top of the characters getting “reworks” we are probably going to do a stat/scaling pass on nearly all of the marksmen to go with the updated marksmen items that are being worked on by the systems team.

We are indeed doing some work on Caitlyn as part of the pre-season’s Marksmen update. None of her abilities are likely to change substantially. As many have mentioned she’s fun and functional on Live. It’s just hard to identify a situation when she’s the right pick over other marksmen.

Here’s the gist of the present direction, roughly ordered big to small in terms of where our changes are likely to focus:

Hone Caitlyn’s strategic identity as a siege/zone control-focused champion, likely by emphasizing her traps.
Hone her thematic identity as a sharpshooter by emphasizing accuracy and range.

Give a bit more depth to her playstyle, likely by emphasizing shot timing and target selection. You should know a person who has 30 games on Cait from one with 5.
Add this depth through rewarding good planning and judgment, not pure mechanical skill.

Retain/enhance her trademark safety, again likely through enhanced traps, in exchange for not being a great tank buster compared to less safe marksmen.
Ensure she has access to offensive rewards should she trade in some of that safety, likely through 90 Caliber Net.

Create limited windows of breathing room to her early pressure so that more champions, when properly played, can fight back against her laning phase.
Use those windows to let us be comfortable with her being a potent lane bully.

We aren’t working on her currently, but she is a champ that we have a ton of interest in for the future. There is so much we could do now to better deliver on the promise of the “psi blade” character. It’ll be a lot of work and we’d probably want to build her from the ground up (new model, anims, kit etc).

When we do start working on her, we will definitely have some dialogue about what are the things that current irelia has that are really working. I would rather we enhance the things that irelia mains love than just create something cool, but too different.

I appreciate your guys’ concern with the upcoming Quinn changes, and I do enjoy seeing threads like these that are well thought out and in the spirit of making a character everyone can be happy with.

We’re still not quite ready yet to discuss Quinn’s upcoming changes in detail, but I’m looking forward to being able to do so. I will say in advance that the above stuff that OP mentions Quinn mains agree on won’t necessarily be everything you can expect from the changes, and I do understand that there will inevitably be players that disagree with some of the changes I’ll end up making, as is the case with almost every update to a character. In her changes, we’re trying to mostly preserve what is cool and fun about the character while hopefully making the whole package make a bit more sense, especially from a gameplay perspective.

I will say that in the update, you can expect her abilities to mostly be the same, with changes here and there to their effects, cast types, numbers, etc.

Personal feeling is that his current ban rate made sense for 5.17 Darius, but doesn’t for 5.18 Darius since he’s lost a noticeable amount of power. He might still be ban worthy for some people/some match ups, and might or might not still be too strong, but not 90% ban rate worthy. I’d expect it to take a while for his ban rate to lower though, most people banning him won’t be seeing him in game in the first place to observe the changes (super high ban rates limit feedback), so it’ll take a while for them to get a read on his revised state.

As far as follow ups go, if we needed to do something flat + % missing, or flat multiplied by % missing on the heal would definitely be one of the things we’d look at. Whether that’s the change we’d go for would depend on what the issue was though (no sense nerfing his heal if something else turns out to be an issue for example).

With the Kindred theme coming out, I’d like to introduce you to Edouard “Ed The Conqueror” Brenneisen, who just joined our music team as composer. Kindred was his first project, and we’re all very excited to have him on our team, writing music for you all in the future.

Together, we work on all musical aspects of League of Legends. We all have different and musical styles and backgrounds that we try to utilize intelligently for all the different projects that we tackle, and one of the awesome aspects of working on this team indeed is being able to learn from each other every single day.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask us whatever you’d like.

Also, for the curious, the awesome dudes from surrenderat20.net already uploaded the theme, which is currently on PBE:

Bilgewater was a fun project to work on, particularly as someone who probably plays 10 ARAM games for every SR game. One of the first things we looked at was what kind of instruments it should have, and whether there should be a “featured” instrument (in the way the Nyckelharpa is for Freljord). We decided that rather than focusing on one instrument, we could capture the melting-pot feel of Bilgewater better by using a variety of different instruments “imported” from other parts of Runeterra, brought together with some questionable playing techniques to make some unsophisticated noise at a pub down by the slaughter docks. The next question was, what should that ensemble sound like?

A lot of the “percussion” that you hear in the track is quite literally what you might hear in a Bilgewater pub: it’s recordings of mugs being slammed down onto wooden tables that I later cut up and assigned to keys in a playable MIDI instrument. Some of the other non-MIDI instruments were chosen based on what was available, which in hindsight I think fits the spirit of how a Bilgewater ensemble would be assembled. We brought back the same bouzouki that chemicalseb used all over Braum’s theme, but after traveling all the way from Freljord we thought it shouldn’t sound that great. To fix this, I tuned it down almost an octave to get a loose, nasty twangy sound from it. I also bought a cheap Mandolin for the project, and while I do my best to play it “correctly” on many parts of the tracks, I think we actually had much more interesting results when I played it with a violin bow. I thought of it as the sound of a drifter with a bit of mostly-forgotten fiddle technique bartering his way into possession of a mandolin somewhere in Bilgewater, and trying to play it like a fiddle because in his addled mind, it looked kind of like one. You can hear this in a lot of the drones, like the ones that begin most of the logins and the champ select music. The voices are a bunch of Rioters having a little too much fun for a Monday afternoon. We’d considered doing lyrics but concluded that it would be too distracting for in-game music.

Musically, I thought everything should be simple and unsophisticated – the kind of music that would be picked up through oral tradition rather than properly learned. Thematically this meant straightforward rhythms with a lot of note repetition and a lot of stepwise motion (moving up or down by just one note rather than in larger leaps). I developed all of this in the map music first, and then later extracted and re-purposed the themes for the various logins. We actually work this way on a lot of our projects, where we might do a promotional video first, and then expand certain elements into the login. (For example Shurima, Ekko, Freljord, and Summoner’s Rift were all done this way.) This often is due to project timelines more than anything else, but it also works in our favor, because it can be tempting to get carried away while working on a standalone login and write music that will be harder to adapt for a more time-locked format.

I have been meaning to get the rest of the music up onto Soundcloud, sorry for the delay! I’ll try to get it up this week 🙂

It’s a really nuanced conversation. The reason we don’t allow surrender immediately (for example once you see what the enemy team comp is) is because it’s often possible to win a come-from-behind victory, and we want to give players an opportunity to focus on strategy rather than focusing on campaigning the team to surrender. In addition, we don’t want to use quick surrender as a run-around leavers. For example, we don’t want to encourage someone harassing you to surrender because they didn’t get the position they wanted or because they didn’t get First Blood.

However, it does also suck when you are really, really far behind (say a couple of players never connected) and you’re just killing time waiting for that 20 minutes to tick down. Our surrender mechanic may need more flexibility in its design.

The open mid situation is further complicated by a number of factors. For example, teams may be throwing games just to get around the surrender limit I discussed above. Or maybe players perceive the game to be more snowbally than it really is, so they feel like playing from behind isn’t worth the effort. (Our data suggests the game isn’t more snowbally for players in most ELOs, but perceptions don’t always match reality.) Also, there may be a perception that since open mid started in Korea, and Koreans have a well-earned reputation as skill players, that they must be onto something. 🙂

No great idea gets into League of Legends without being examined, challenged, and mutated by our collaborative process. When Marco â€œWendigoâ€ Silva, an artist from the SÃ£o Paulo office, dreamed up â€œCyber Yi,â€ he knew itâ€™d be put through that creative gauntlet.

Silva wanted to fight hard for his idea, so he put together a team of concept artists and animators and created a 50-page presentation detailing how a legendary Yi skin could fit into an entire universe inspired by classic cyberpunk films. The first few Rioters who saw the pitch sent it around to others, and it spread virally through the company. People started piling aboard Silvaâ€™s cybernetic hype train.

Still, there were obstacles Silva hadn’t considered. While the Cyber Yi concept was still being pitched, a team at Riotâ€™s Santa Monica office was independently working on a cybernetic-themed skin called PROJECT: Yasuo. Our artists thought that Cyber Yi might complement the new Yasuo skin, but first theyâ€™d need to figure out the artistic direction for PROJECT: Yasuo â€” and for any other champions that might fit into that world.

Cyber Yi would need to evolve.

PROJECT vs. the Robots

Two other futuristic, techy skin lines existed in League of Legends at this time: the hulking “Mecha” skins (featuring Malphite, Aatrox, and Kha’Zix) and the fiery, monstrous “Battlecast” army (starring Creator Viktor and his mechanized mutations of Kog’Maw, Vel’Koz, Cho’Gath, Urgot, and Skarner).

Battlecast, says visual effects artist Adam â€œRiot AdamUnicornâ€ Kupratis, â€œis like what the Vikings would build if you gave them combustion engines.” There’s black oil, hot sparks, pistons, a fuel source. “Everything’s on fire and it’s gonna hurt to be near it.â€

In the Battlecast designs, all the armor and weapons are forward-facing. “They’re not worried about what’s behind them because they’ve already killed everything in their path,” says Larry Ray.

Mecha, on the other hand, pulls influence from Giant-Robot/Monster-Attacking-The-City movies and animes. The sensitive parts of the mechs are covered up and painted, bringing form and function together to create a gigantic machine that looks like it could fit a whole family of yordles in the cockpit.

Artists decided to keep PROJECT skins people-sized, though the champions have fused and augmented their bodies using some big, crazy technology. â€œIn order to become PROJECT you have to surrender your humanity,” says Lisa â€œSaiyakaâ€ Thorn, a visual designer. “The technology takes over your soul.”

Using certain shapes and colors can unify skins in subtle ways. Cold, teal-tinged steel defines Mecha designs, while fiery bursts of orange and red light the unpainted Battlecast bots from within. Most of the PROJECT champs also sit somewhere on the spectrum between yellow and red, says Kupratis, but the skins â€œplay with subtractive elements.â€ By this he means other colors peek out of the PROJECT champions’ gear, but are muted by the surrounding light.

In the Battlecast skins, cylinders spring out of every joint and opening: Cho’Gath’s mandibles are replaced by tubes, and a slew of pistons bursts out of Kog’Mawâ€™s muzzle. Hexagons dominate the Mecha skin line. They show up in the honeycomb-like texture of Kha’Zix’s wings, but also the shape of his head, the bend of his arms. Artists call these sorts of defining details â€œshape language,â€ and clearly determining the shape language for each champ and skin line creates a sort of visual consistency thatâ€™s easily understood and recognized by players.

To determine the shape language for PROJECT Skins, we had to do more than differentiate the skins from Battlecast and Mecha. Paul â€œSpaceW0mbatâ€ Hoefener, the concept artist behind the original PROJECT: Yasuo skin, sees it as a combination of digital (think hardware, fitted with chips and carbon casings) and ethereal, intangible effects. â€œThe way the particles dissolve feels magical,â€ Hoefener says, â€œbut it’s still tech.â€ To dig deeper into this idea, the art team wrote a complete definition of what â€œPROJECTâ€ means.

PROJECT: is the perfect fusion of oneâ€™s supernatural essence with advanced weaponry and body augmentation. This linking of technology and energy allows extraordinary hosts to channel their essence into physical manifestations and, in rare cases, transcend the corporeal plane. Only subjects possessing extremely focused inner essence and exceptional physical attributes can unlock the true power of PROJECT.

Ultimately, PROJECT is about transforming the â€œmere humanâ€ forms of champions using technology, and the shape language the artists used reflects that. â€When champs use their heightened PROJECT powers, itâ€™s through shapes and geometry that fit their unique characteristics,â€ says Thorn.

Fiora, for example, is graceful yet sharp â€” it looks like it might sting if you bumped into her. Lucian is defined by sleek, speedy-looking parallelograms, and his W bursts into a compass rose. Designers wanted those elements to peek through even after the champs fused their souls with technology to become PROJECT. So, PROJECT: Fioraâ€™s pointy triangles became digitized. PROJECT: Lucianâ€™s bursts got brighter and burstier.

From Brazil to the Rift

Players loved the PROJECT concept, but it took time to figure out how to integrate its themes and ideas with the potential suggested by Marco Silvaâ€™s pitch for â€œCyber Yi.â€ Size, color, shape, purpose, personality: each of these elements had to be carefully considered and toyed with to turn PROJECT into a full-blown skin line.

Hoefener says that the long, multi-faceted design process PROJECT: Yi went through is all part of what defines League of Legendsâ€™ artistic sensibility. â€œBy the end of the process everybodyâ€™s put their personal spin on it,â€ he says, â€œand thatâ€™s how it gets League-ified.â€

For Silva, seeing his â€œCyber Yiâ€ idea evolve into PROJECT: Yi is like a dream come true. He says he’s still a Master Yi main, â€œbut now there’ll just be a lot more particles flying everywhere when I gank people.”

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me atÂ @NoL_ChefoÂ or e-mail me at nolchefo@gmail.com.